Scattered marvels in the Liszt, a total dud in the Chopin
Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 11/13/2008
(4 out of 5 stars)
"I don't have the documentation for this two-fer from Decca, but I wanted to offer some cautionary advice. Sviatoslav Richter cannot be judged by the material owned by Philips, who released a massive Richter Edition from which thse reissues are largely drawn. It's perverse to switch them to Decca, since that label owns only a scant amount of Richter recordings. Unfortunately, most of the Philips material is from late in the great pianist's career, and not enough of it is first-rate. For taht, you must hunt and peck through hundreds of albums scattered over dozens of labels.
That said, Vol. 10 contains some marvellous Liszt, including a mesmerizing Sonata in B minor, one of the pianist's specialties. You can find half a dozen accounts, some even more galvanizing than this relatively tame one. Richter is variable in the Transcendental Etudes, a live performance -- still, there are stretches of great playing. Sadly, all the Chopin is forgettable. It was quirky of Richter to perform only 10 of the Preludes; here in a live concert he's lazy and dull. The Polonaise sleepwalks and then explodes. The Barcarolle is soporific.
The sad truth is that the aging Richter was only sporadically up to his best; keep in mind that he was 45 in 1960 when he first came to Westrn attention, and he was playing erratically by the Eighties, living until 1997. If you are tempted by the bargain price, then make your choice on that basis. But if you want to hear this titan of the keyboard at his peak, I'd start with the live concrts on BBC Legends, the live material from the Prague Festival that Richter attended for many years (on labels like Praga and Olympia), the multi-volume Soviet material packaged as "Richter in the Fifties" on Parnassus, the Beethoven sonatas collected by Music & Arts, and perhaps the remastered archival recordings on DoReMi. As for the major labels, the biggest library is evenly split between EMI and DG, with a solitary exception that cannot be missed: his towering Brahms concerto #2 on RCA/BMG."
Unbelievable
David Saemann | 07/16/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"God, where to start about these two CDs! On the debit side, one should note that the recorded sound varies from fair to good, but is never actually unpleasant. The reviewer of these discs in American Record Guide said that the Chopin performances sounded like Richter on an off day. We all should have such off days. His Chopin is delicate, sensitive, and beautifully articulated. Some people might prefer a more robust treatment of Chopin. No one could make such a claim about the Liszt. The Sonata is riveting throughout, not just in the big moments but in so many details that Richter brings out with coloration and intellect. Not all the performances are undoctored. There are a number of obvious splices in Liszt's Polonaise No. 2, which preserve a splendid performance. The selections from the Transcendental Etudes in places are just jaw dropping. People make such a fuss over Marc Andre Hamelin's technique, but Richter had all that plus an interpretive vision that Hamelin, to my ears, lacks. The last piece on the album is Gnomenreigen, which Richter dispatches with wit and awesome technique. These are some of the best piano performances of anything in the entire catalog."
